František Gult

“There were about eighty of us and we were divided into groups of five to eight people. Each group had its leader, who assigned tasks. The group was formed so that we could keep our regiment and garrison in sight. There were other groups that were tasked with taking the people in question to the hide-outs and to take care of them and protect them if it came to it. It was quite well thought out. Our task to protect also meant that we had the ability to protect ourselves not only verbally, but also in other ways. We had some means of making our defence a bit more effective. I’m saying this indirectly, but simply, it was possible to show (the Russians) that they were not doing it quite right, that we would defend ourselves. We had a radio station, but only an R-352 type with a range of about ten kilometres. It was used by the soldiers who were training to be radio operators. But we didn’t use the radio station much, because the Soviet armies had high quality interception, and they could have thus obtained information about our groups around Holešov.”

“Our main goal was to find and destroy nuclear warhead carriers, and in those days the greatest nuclear weapon threat was the Pershing. Our goal was to find out where the missiles are, where they are moving, where they are hidden, and so on. Of course, we only had mock-ups of them on our territory; those were moved around in cars, and it was our mission to find out where they were headed and to report all of this in code, including the coordinates - and possibly to eliminate the missile with our own attack, whether by air or otherwise. The mock-up was only a wooden frame wrapped in sheets with the information we were supposed to found out written on it. I have one story from eliminating these missiles. One time we reported: a missile is moving along there and there. And we received the task to destroy or damage it for practice. So what could we do to show clearly enough that we had damaged it? It was close to one village, and there was a barrel of whitewash nearby. So we came up with the idea to put a fire cracker into it. And we aimed it so that all the whitewash spattered on to both the vehicle and the rocket. It was proof that we had destroyed the rocket at least in this way.”

“The short period from August to early September didn’t have any deep effect on us soldiers at the time, as we were fulfilling our orders. We were prepared to do what was necessary, what we had sworn to do, to defend the Czechoslovak Republic. We were trained to do that and we were complying to orders with one aim only: do not allow it! And so we did not allow entry. We were the only unit that did not allow the Soviet armies to occupy its barracks. Representatives of the army that surrounded us remained outside. We didn’t give them naught, not even water, as the saying goes. No, we didn’t give them anything at all. The Soviet soldiers then destroyed all the crops in the vicinity, we couldn’t influence that of course. But one consequence of us not allowing the barracks to be occupied was that some of our officers got it bad. It was also the reason why our unit was disbanded after existing for about ten years.”

“We weren’t always able to avoid contact with civilians. Especially in the winter when we had to find a good place to sleep. It was difficult to make a fire in the winter without showing your position, but you needed to keep warm... So our favourite hide-outs were cow sheds, it was always warm there. The cows kept it cosy and you could snug into the straw. It was warmer there than outside in the snow. But we also got into contact with the guard, who found us there. Of course, he wanted to report us, because we were there in civvies and he didn’t trust us, even though we did identify ourselves somehow. He didn’t trust us and he wanted to report us as thieves and goodness knows what. So we had to ‘temporarily inconvenience him in a suitable way’ to give us time to get out of there. The milkmaids who came there in the morning found him there and set him free, but we were long gone by then. We also got into the situation where a civilian found us out, and that was our mess-up. Because if they reported us, we would be punished upon returning to the barracks, perhaps with a two day ban.”

“We amassed in the Holešov Palace, and we tried to partially confuse the Soviet soldiers. They were following our every move. Our military vehicles left the barracks, and the Soviet soldiers at first presumed that someone was leaving the premises. But those were empty vehicles and their aim was to hide the fact that we were already amassing elsewhere. The Russians believed it for a while, but they gradually found out that a certain number of our troops had been transported out into the surrounding area. Our mission was to build hide-outs in the Hostýn Hills, which could be used to hide those of our citizens who were trying to be detained by Soviet forces. Hide-outs that we could subsequently also defend. But our deployment around Holešov, especially around the barracks, had one other important purpose: to also protect the soldiers who remained in the barracks, because about eighty of us were deployed, but several hundred soldiers remained on the premises. They stayed there awaiting further orders. In the case of armed conflict between the Holešov garrison and the soldiers surrounding us, our mission was to protect the premises and to aid those who had remained inside the barracks. Luckily that didn’t happen. We built the hide-outs, dirt bunkers and so on in the forests around Dobrotice. From there we had a partial view of the barracks on the edge of Holešov. We could see what was going on quite well.”